


Regarding Resurrection Sickness and Related Recovery

by CatKing_Catkin



Series: Mollymauk Lives Fest [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Cats, D&D Mechanics, Developing Relationship, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mollymauk Lives Fest, Mollymauk Tealeaf Lives, POV Mollymauk Tealeaf, Pre-Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast, Reading Aloud, Resurrection, Sickfic, Speculation, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-24 01:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17694563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatKing_Catkin/pseuds/CatKing_Catkin
Summary: The Mighty Nein are finally able to return to Molly with the resources, strength, and magic to bring him back from the dead.Unfortunately, coming back from the dead is something of an ordeal, especially when the one being resurrected has been dead for nearly a year. Molly is laid up for the next while with debilitating resurrection sickness. Caleb takes point in taking care of him.(Written for the Mollymauk Lives Fest, Day 2, prompt "roommates".)





	Regarding Resurrection Sickness and Related Recovery

Rationally, he knew that he was alive, but it was hard for rationality to get much of a grip in his thoughts when he still  _felt_  sick to the point of dying. His limbs ached to the tips of his fingers and yet were utterly beyond his control, his body shivered with a fever that seemed to run hot one instant and bitingly cold the next, his tongue felt like lead and his head was full of fog and corrosive poison.

He knew he must be dying; it shouldn’t be possible to live through this much misery. Dying before had been brutally quick, and now it would be lingering and slow and painful and somehow that seemed brutally  _unfair_.

But his friends stubbornly refused to accept the reality of the situation. Every time he drifted back into consciousness, there was someone else sitting by his bedside. First it was Fjord helping him drink, then Nott braiding his hair while humming anxiously to herself. Jester was guiding a spoon to his mouth, then it seemed like he blinked and then a  _stranger_  was rubbing something into his joints that nevertheless eased the aches so he didn’t try to muster the strength to question or protest. Then the next thing he knew was throwing up over the side of the bed, and Yasha’s hand rubbing his back, murmuring to him in an indistinct but soothing sort of way.

Another blink, and then the room was dark, the sound of rain battering the windows drowning out the sounds of his own labored breathing. Someone was petting his hair. He didn’t realize who until it sank in that he was feeling the texture of bandages, rather than skin. He managed to force his eyes open enough to see a blurred shape with red hair, which narrowed down the possibilities from two to one.

Caleb must have noticed that he’d come awake enough to stare, because his hand paused in its ministrations. Molly felt a disappointed sort of sound vibrate in his throat, and he was able to make his head move enough to try and press up into Caleb’s palm, trying to urge him to move again. He thought he heard the wizard laugh softly, though it might have been a trick of the rain, and he did as he’d been bidden.

“Mister Mollymauk,” he said. “I think you might finally be on the mend.”

That sounded like one of the most ridiculous things Molly had ever heard. Then he remembered that Caleb was very smart. Caleb knew a lot about a lot of things. So if Caleb thought Molly was getting better, maybe he was.

He was at least able to make a vaguely assenting sort of noise in reply, which was more than he’d been able to manage in what felt like a minor eternity. So maybe Caleb was on to something. Caleb rewarded him for it by scratching his nails ever-so-lightly against the base of Molly’s horns, where bone met skin. “I will tell you what you have missed out on later. I doubt you would remember anything I told you now. Go to sleep, Molly. I will be here.”

And he was right about all of that. Molly was asleep in what felt like an instant. Caleb was there when he clawed his way back to consciousness, and he didn’t remember much about the night before except for the sound of Caleb’s voice and the feeling of fingers carding gently through his hair.

He also felt a bit better. As his vision swam back into focus, he found that he was able to focus on the details of the room without them sliding out of reach immediately. It was a surprisingly well-kept room. The bed had red satin sheets, the chairs were cushioned, there were curtains on the window, a pitcher and a bowl by the bed.

The last thing he remembered was the glaive slamming down into his chest. To go from that to this was a shock, to say the least, and he wondered blearily if this was some god’s idea of heaven after all.

Then Molly was able to close his fingers around the memory of  _why_  he’d died to a glaive in his chest. He choked on a breath even as he started struggling to get up. “Hey…” His voice sounded weak and faint, little more than a kitten’s cry. “Where’s—”

“Jester, Fjord, and Yasha are safe.” His head snapped round fast enough to make his neck crick. His gaze focused on the sight of Caleb, sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, clearly having been deep into reading before Molly got his attention. With some solemnity, he closed the book, set it aside, then clicked his fingers. With a whisper of displaced air, Frumpkin appeared on the bed, before immediately trotting over to Molly and scaling his chest as if the tiefling were nothing more than a particularly gaudy mountain. The weight was slight but significant, especially as weak as he felt, and Molly slumped onto his back beneath it. He rather suspected, even as bleary as he was, that this had been the goal. “They have been safe for, ah, for some time now.”

Molly took a minute to consider this. In the meantime, he attempted to make his hands work enough to scratch Frumpkin behind the ears. The cat tolerated his rather fumbling efforts with good grace.

“How long have I been dead?” he finally managed to ask. He heard Caleb let out a breath.

“Not quite a year,” the wizard said, in a mercifully steady voice.

“Oh,” Molly said, a touch faintly, and he wondered for a wild moment if he was going to be sick again. It didn’t feel like there was anything in his stomach, so probably not.

Fortunately, Caleb seemed to take his silence as a queue to continue. “The others are off paying off some, er--" He waved a hand as if to tease the right word out of the air. "--favors we accrued, in exchange for materials and, and help getting back this far north. They went out earlier this morning. Jester has promised to send a message if they won’t be back before dark.”

“So what are you still doing here?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Caleb flinch. He didn’t quite know how to feel about that.

“Someone had to stay,” his friend said at last. “Resurrection sickness is, is nothing to fuck around with, and apparently only gets worse the longer someone is dead.”

“‘Resurrection sickness’,” Molly murmured, sounding each syllable out, turning them over and over in his mouth, finding his voice still a little slurred with the effort. The next thought came to him unbidden, and he was too tired to not give voice to it. “How do you know that?”

Caleb didn’t answer. Molly managed to turn his head to look at him properly, to find that Caleb was frowning down at his arms instead, picking at the bandages. It was a familiar nervous habit. His heart probably shouldn’t have ached so fiercely to realize as much, and it was harder to ignore now that the other aches were fading.

“Let’s just say,” Caleb said at last, very deliberately, very carefully. “That you are not the only one who has spent some time on the other side since then, Mollymauk. And it is absolutely something I would wish on my worst enemy. But not on a friend.”

Laughing hurt, but he laughed anyway. “Nor would I,” Molly said once he’d gotten his breath back, with as much feeling as he’d managed to say anything so far. And then, after a beat to gather his fractured nerves: “We’re still friends?”

The question on his lips probably seemed a foolish question to ask, ridiculous in light of _everything else_ to take in. But he’d been dead for nearly a year. That was _such_ a long time when you’d only gotten two years so far. Mollymauk Tealeaf knew better than most just how much could happen in a year. Your entire life could change and then end in less than three months, for gods’ sakes.

So the fact that Caleb looked at him like he’d grown a second head should have been reassuring. But the way his expression softened when he realized that Molly was actually serious was even moreso. “Mollymauk,” he said, with achingly familiar solemnity. “One friend to another, you are talking nonsense.” He got up from his chair, moved around to the side of the bed, and drew the rumpled sheets up and over Molly and Frumpkin both as if physically putting the matter as well as the tiefling to rest. Frumpkin tolerated this for all of five seconds before he hopped off the bed with an indignant noise and went to hide beneath it instead. “But the sickness only lasts for four days, and you are nearly through the third. Nearly out of the woods.”

“That’s good to hear,” Molly mumbled, already feeling the fever’s chill starting to lessen somewhat as the space under the blankets grew warm. Caleb tapped him on the forehead to keep him from closing his eyes right then and there, for the sake of holding a mug of tea to his lips and helping Molly drink it.

“Do you want food, or more sleep?” Caleb asked, when the mug was half empty and Molly waved it away.

“Sleep,” Molly answered without hesitation, and was seized by a yawn in the next breath.

“All right,” Caleb said, and he turned away, presumably to return to his chair. Molly was proud of himself for managing to control his own arm enough to reach out and grab his friend’s wrist.

“Read to me?” he asked, in little more than a whisper, scarcely daring to hope. What the hell, he already felt sick and weak and fragile, he was well past the point of pride.

Caleb was silent for one breaths, two, three. When he gently reached down to pry Molly’s hand off his wrist, at least he kept holding it after, and then it felt like the first time in a lifetime for Molly that even a brief smile hadn’t hurt. “I’m, ah, I’m afraid you would find this particular book a little dry, Mollymauk.”

“Don’t care,” Molly said stubbornly. “I just—” And maybe he wasn’t quite out of pride after all. He worried at his lower lip for a moment, before deciding to go for broke. Caleb had laid a few cards on the table. Molly owed him the same. Hells, Molly owed him and all the rest of the Nein that and more than he could ever repay for…this. “’m tired of quiet. You know?”

Caleb let out a breath as if all the air had just been punched out of his lungs. He still had his face turned away from Molly, but Molly was able to see the line of fresh tension suddenly humming through his shoulders. “I know,” he said, very quietly. When he pulled his hand away, Molly let him go, and was rewarded when Caleb dragged his chair over to the side of the bed instead, book in hand.

Despite the fact that he’d asked for this very thing, Molly found himself driven on to interrupt Caleb one last time. It felt like the air couldn’t be truly clear until he did.

“I’m sorry you died,” he said.

Caleb’s hands were moving with an ironclad steadiness which betrayed how hard he was fighting to maintain his self-control. After a long, breathless moment of deliberation, he reached out to smooth Molly’s sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. “And I am sorry you died,” he said, very quietly, before taking in another deep breath to steady his nerves. “Still. Water under the bridge now, _ja_?”

Molly grinned weakly and let his eyes fall closed at last. “ _Ja ja_.”

He was pretty sure he heard Caleb murmur “ _scoundrel_ ” under his breath. But maybe that was just a trick of his fevered, exhausted mind. Either way, he cleared his throat and opened the book. “‘The five principles of scrying are, in order of importance and discovery…’”

It was indeed one of the most unbearably dry texts Molly had ever heard. That was all right, though. He hadn’t asked because he cared about the words.


End file.
